Gadgetory

first rule when you set up to make a small cheap car is to try not make it look like a small cheap car on that front I think Maz is off to a pretty darn good start let's drive this 2014 mazda3 5-door ass Grand Touring and check the tech the first thing I love about this Mazda 3 is the look and the quality of the cabin materials this is kind of out es on a much better budget nice looking understated trim this is the new Mazda look it's tack centric a little digital speedo in the corner and everything else is pushed out as a periphery now of course the next thing that grabs your eye is this this is an all new look and feel for them it's the now in vogue in the industry toaster slot tablet-style head unit screen you've got apps your media luckily all in one place thank you Mazda no one else seems to do that communication navigation in your overall settings and here's your source list it's all the hits that you need am/fm with HD radio satellite aha Pandora and stitcher apps are built in but you have to launch them on your phone to get this to talk bluetooth streaming USB optical disk of course everything is done from a controller down here with home buttons for major functions little Audi like volume knob to the right unfortunately it's kind of surrounded by other knobs it's really kind of hard to operate I wish they'd make it taller or wider or something when you're driving you see the speed limits show up here in the left corner of the screen that's really good and if you exceed the speed limit it turns red and yellow to remind you that's something very cool I don't think I've seen that before navigation entries pretty easily done via the controller or via the voice button over here unfortunately we hit the voice button you'll get really clear prompts on the screen what you can or should say on the other hand you can enter the destination as one blurp from street number to state without having to go bucket by bucket that's commendable on the other hand when you want to turn down the voice guidance which I often don't use get this the voice stops talking it's muted but it still mutes the left side of the audio system when it would have been talking that makes no sense I can't believe that actually made it out of production it's infuriating as hell one thing I am missing here is there is no live internet search to destination like you'll find in a BMW Mercedes Audi no Google in other words you'd have to know the address or use the PIO eye database are never very good and as you're going to start to notice here there are an incredible number of settings I haven't seen on most other cars that spooks the average driver I'm not a big fan of things like calling focus of the HUD calibration just call it focus an incredible number of traffic settings including something called detour sensitivity I do this for a living and I have no idea what that is traffic is forked in two sessions there's online traffic which requires a Wi-Fi hotspot device look up to the car and then under apps you've got HD radio delivered traffic which is a separate traffic map that's not part of the navigation screen so this is kind of a scattered mess of too many choices too much gobbledygook and jargon and not enough unifications fuel economy monitors interesting the cars that have ie loop the dumbest trade name in the auto business actually have regenerative braking which is not uncommon but in this case they use an alternator that can run at 12 or even higher volts to charge a capacitor not the battery that's really high-tech stuff we'll explain the use of capacitors versus batteries in a future car tech 101 on CNET on cars we have the optional Bose Centerpoint with audio pilot noise cancelling I got to say this system did a really good job with tortured signals like satellite radio brought them up clean without a lot of that artifacting sibilance so big up on that now you may have noticed we've got a little projection screen that winks up off the dash when you start the car and this sort of a blue electro fluorescent camera under there giving us a pretty rudimentary display the problem we had was the thing is very uneven sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't sometimes the height control actually does something sometimes it doesn't and sometimes the image just goes up and out and I couldn't get it back we've also got blind spot detection like the Lane Departure it's passive little indicators light up in the mirrors adaptive cruise control on this car that means it'll maintain speed and distance ahead there is no assisted parking on this car you do get a rear-view camera sensors though oddly enough are optional now one of the hood this mazda3 because it's an asus port model has a two and a half litre inline-four the I cars will have a 2 litre inline-four what they have in common is something called SKYACTIV technology in a nutshell that means it's a really high compression engine almost at diesel levels of compression 184 horsepower 185 foot-pounds of torque 0 to 60 for this 3,000 pound car is a respectable seven and a half seconds notice that three thousand pounds is pretty light by today's standards mpg is twenty seven thirty seven transmission and drivetrain are straightforward six-speed automatic only and a real automatic not a CVT and front-wheel drive the thing feels like it's put together like a drum there's not a rattle in the car and I'm on a crappy waterfront road right now so that's saying sorry now here's the odd thing the engine does not feel as good to me as it looks on paper I don't get a lot in that 20 to 80 percent of petal travel it just kind of gets stuck in unbearably tall gears in fact I'll tell you I thought it was a CVT when I first drove the car you know I never look at the spec sheet so I've driven the car for a while and I would not have bet it wasn't automatic the head-up display is kind of badly positioned because it puts the data the Texas on it right over the arm of the wiper which is a busy background and it's not my famous is a shame for a HUD it's actually kind of out of my line of sight you can put that stuff in the dash and it would be just as good okay this price our Mazda 3 this is pretty much top of the line loaded so looking at 27 3/4 an S 2 and a half litre Grand Touring trim that brings in and having a bunch of other tech then on top of that we're going to add twenty six hundred bucks for the Grand Touring tech package that adds the ie loop capacitor based regeneration system kind of high-tech stuff lane departure warning blind spot warning adaptive cruise control other options include rear sensors oddly enough for Alucard at 450 and remote start is 575 you're a little over $30,000 this guy loaded up and the cabin tech as I showed you is kind of getting out in front of its skis and definitely has some bugs that need to be worked out overall though they've got a serious contender in the second you